


Certain We Live Forever

by ravened



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: F/M, Julia's POV, Mild Hurt/Comfort, exploration of julia and magnus after his epilogue bc it made me cry obviously, the rest of the seven + others r also mentioned but im not taggint them, two lomls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-23
Updated: 2018-04-23
Packaged: 2019-04-26 23:11:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14412531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravened/pseuds/ravened
Summary: Julia knew her husband. She knew the way he smiled, wide and cheerful. She knew the way his rough hands held her, soft and comforting. She knew the way he looked at her, too, eyes bright with wonder. But in some ways, it was like meeting for the first time.Being a hero came at a cost.





	Certain We Live Forever

**Author's Note:**

> "heaven is a place like this  
> four walls to hide within  
> a cold, cold world's medicine  
> knowing you won't have to sleep alone again"

They kept no mirrors in their make-believe, astral plane dwelling.

The wall above their sink was blank, but the screws that used to hold its glass still laid embedded in the plaster. It was hard to remember that they were mere souls playing pretend when their house stood in such a realistic way. To Julia, Magnus looked about the same as when she knew him last, but she knew the face he saw was one ages old, buried in the dusty spaces of his memory. It was a face that’d endured one hundred years of destruction, a face that watched the disappearance of his first home as he flew away and one that withheld the burned ruins of his second. To her, it was only the same face that kissed her with a sweetness she could not forget. But she found him once over the shattered remains of his reflection, eyes red and full of sorrow, and they both agreed not to look for a replacement.

She wasn’t upset about being unable to see her own appearance either.

Having spent years upon years floating simply as a soul in a sea of souls, having hands and a physical body again took some getting used to. As a soul, she 'd remembered emotion, but as a soul she'd forgotten the way her heart could pound with love and the way her eyes could sting with grief. She forgot the feeling of hands on her thighs, lips on her jaw, hot breath in the crook of her neck and fingers tangled in her hair, the greedy rush of ecstasy and the way her voice arced his name—this was love served hot, dripping with pleasure, caked in the feeling of skin on skin—

 

She never forgot the bite of longing.

That was the feeling that struck her first: as the world drowned in blackness and a song echoed in the dark, she watched her husband live and live and _live_ , and she longed. It didn’t stop when he lived decades after, years which she clung to the story told at the near-end of the existence and picked apart every instance of his mention. It didn’t stop when he came back to her, and recapped things for her in his own, charming way (she cried, hard, when he described the chalice’s offer); didn’t stop when an emotion she couldn’t read passed into his eyes: some left-over reflection on an experience she never knew.

“Tell me,” she kept saying. And he did. 

He had stories—a world of them. She clung to him, tried to learn every inch of his life like she relearned every inch of his body. Sometimes she heard things she’d known, but in a different light (he’d lived under two suns, not one). Stories of childhood that became warped with memory loss sprang back into form. Sometimes she heard things she’d never known: he’d been savior of a small town not once, but three times (twice for Refuge, once for Ravens’ Roost). Sometimes she heard things she’d known, but never from his mouth, and learning about it again from him was nearly like listening for the first time. Knowing that he’d saved the world was entirely different from knowing how much he’d struggled to save the world. It was entirely different knowing he’d saved the world _thinking of her._

 

Sometimes his friends swung around to visit, most often the liches passing through on jobs for The Raven Queen. The rest came by breaking some rule or another: Taako usually just clung to the coattails of his husband. Julia's favorite visitor was the inexplicably polite young man with glasses too big for his face.

"Yes ma'am," he'd said, when she asked if Magnus had treated him well. Merle laughed about that, but there was something fond in his voice as he ruffled the boy’s hair. A familiarity and liveliness that seemed to fill the house whenever anyone came to visit, and she was delighted by the vivacity of her husband’s second family. Back at Raven’s Roost he’d had local followers but none who knew him well, and Julia had always gotten the vague impression of loneliness, like he was missing connections. Now that she knew of them—and met them, too, she understood the absence she’d felt those years ago.

 

And Julia would have liked to know them all better, but mortality was a thing that chased them all.

 

When Lucretia died Magnus sat at the end of their bed and shook with sobs for the better part of an hour. His tears weren't particularly angry, or even sorrowful, just the only reaction that possessed enough emotion. Julia wrapped herself around him and buried her face in his shirt as he cried.

"She lived well," said someone, maybe Lup. "The only thing left for her to do was die." And she would be the first of their seven to truly pass on and join the vast pool of deceased souls to be locked away from the living for the rest of eternity. Not even the Raven Queen's own reapers could pick out her individual light; that was a power reserved for the goddess alone. 

"What's it like?" he asked Julia, several nights later. The pale light of a spirit moon illuminated his face in rectangles through the window.

"Dying?" she said. "You know what that's like."

"No," he answered. "After dying. When you're just a soul." A pause. "I want to know if she's peaceful, Jules."

She smiled softly. "I'm sure she is."

His gaze flickered, and he reached out a careful hand to brush her cheek. “Were you peaceful?” he asked, and voice was low and rough in the dark. 

Julia closed her eyes. “Go to sleep, love,” she said.

 

They were lucky their sleep was dreamless. She didn’t remember much of flame and crumbling wood, but she knew it would try to haunt her if it could. As for Magnus—well, there was much more.

The first few nights had been awkward and disheartening. They shifted and squirmed, tossed accidental elbows and knees painfully into abdomens and seemed overall like two severely mismatched puzzle pieces.

“How did we do this before?” grunted Magnus, after Julia knocked him in the jaw while trying to turn around.

“Too many years sleeping alone?” she said, but it was barely a joke.

When she finally found a comfortable nook in the curve of his chest and the drape of his arm over her side, she woke hours later in the dead of night only to push away.

“Sorry, too hot,” she gasped, sweating.

“Just hold my hand.”

 

Their fingers still fit each other perfectly. And in time, the rest followed.

 

It wasn’t the same; they’d been cut apart and painstakingly restitched, held together until they grew new connections, but it wasn’t worse. It was a new kind of mold, one born of loss and understanding deeper than anything that had flowed before. This time she could say she knew the true extent of his heroism, which spanned a hundred planets and a hundred years. This time she could say she knew the true extent of his sorrow.

“But in all those years, Julia, nothing I felt compared with when I lost you.”

There was nothing she could do feel her heart swell with love as she shivered at the thought of being valued more than every woodland creature and sweet-faced child that had ever graced the universe.

 

-

 

They would leave two things behind. One was the stolen memory of a tyrant, someone long-dead and irrelevant, who’d shaped several aspects of their fates with one devastating, selfish action. Magnus had chased him for years, until his name and face was plucked cleanly away to be replaced by vague idea. Second was a wooden rocking chair, the last of their playhouse home, standing in the Raven Queen’s palace as remembrance to The Protector’s life.

Each of the seven (with no exception to those working in eternal servitude to the goddess) was granted space for one belonging to live in her castle as homage to their existence. For some it was easy—Taako left his greatest culinary creation and namesake. Merle left his wooden hand, blessed by Pan. Lucretia, her white-oak staff. Lup, the umbrella she’d inhabited for nearly a decade.

“Aren’t you going to leave your axe?” asked Julia, for it was what had carried him through the end of the world. “Or that...sword?” She meant the ridiculous one.

Magnus stroked the wood he was carving, strikingly identical to the one he’d made in their last living memory together—black oak and lavender polish.

“It isn’t really about me,” he said. “I want them to remember you, too.”

 

She kissed him until time itself forgot. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> i don't know when i started loving you  
> now it's all that i [can do](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0Slnk6TaOA)


End file.
